Socializing them right into the hate camp

Ah, the pleasures of living in a small town in Red America: the high schools are fertile fields for fostering hate, and now it’s facilitated by technology, like Facebook, that allows them to sow it far and wide. My daughter is on a rampage right now, upset because her erstwhile peers at the high school have been putting their bigotry proudly on display. There is currently some ferocious babble going on in a Morris Area High School facebook site, and here’s one of the more outrageous comments:

Okay this is really random but it has to deal with the comment about homosexuality issue that Sibley brought up. Honestly why must our country keep discussing this issue. We all know it’s wrong and that it just shouldn’t be that way. If you want to go with the same sex move somewhere else. Please before we ship yah off. Honestly just get rid of them and then we won’t have this issue. Just ship them to Canada. But yah homosexuality is just wrong so just say no and get over it. It’s never gonna be right so yah!!

There’s more there—way too much more—and there are lots of kids who are blindly supporting that kind of statement. They say “it’s wrong” and that’s enough: their brains shut down, they’ve got nothing to back it up, and they just repeat the “just wrong” mantra over and over again, spicing it up with eliminationist calls to get rid of them. “So yah!!” sums up their reasoning perfectly.

Where do these kids pick up this kind of bigotry? From their parents and churches, of course, but also, the schools out here have been collaborators in a conspiracy of silence. A year ago last Spring, we had a perfect example: the university put on a play about tolerance and diversity, and regional schools boycotted the event, and the reaction to the Vagina Monologues has been similarly backwards. There are no processes in place to teach kids something more than their tradition-based dogmatic ignorance: the schools have given up, some of the churches encourage it, and whole families wallow in this level of stupidity.

And the kid who says we should ship all the gays to Canada? He’s student body president at the high school. He’s a member of the popular clique.

Reason #7 to vote for Pharyngula

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Yeah, I’m thinking of the kittens. I’m thinking real hard.

I was going to say, “Because if you don’t vote for me, I’m feeding the kittens to the Kraken,” but then I realized that the kind of people who’d vote for me would probably want me to feed the kittens to the Kraken. And then I realized it didn’t matter how anyone voted, because I was going to feed the kittens to the Kraken anyway. So what the heck. Kittens. Kraken. Kraken Chow. That’s the way it is. As the kittens must accept their fate, so must Phil.

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Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Because the kittens won’t be spared whether you do or don’t.

P.S. I’m sure Respectful Insolence would love to have the endorsement of a kitty-grinding blog for Best Medical/Health Issues Blog. I’m holding out for the promise of a Hitler Zombie/EneMan crossover, though.

Last gasp of my development course

Today, I gave my final lecture in developmental biology this term. We have one more class session which will be a final discussion, but I’m done yapping at them. Since I can’t possibly teach them everything, I offered some suggestions on what to read next, if they’re really interested in developmental biology. They’ve gotten the fundamentals of the dominant way of looking at development now, that good ol’ molecular genetics centered modern field of evo-devo, but I specifically wanted to suggest a few titles to shake them up a little bit and start thinking differently.

  • For the student who is interested in the field, but doesn’t feel that development is necessarily their discipline, I recommended Richard Lewontin’s The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s short, it’s easy, and it’s a good counterweight to the usual gene-happy approach we see in developmental biology.

  • Since we are a liberal arts university, and we value a philosophical approach in addition to the usual bluntly pragmatic tactics we follow in the sciences, I also recommended one work of philosophy: The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Susan Oyama. That one is not an easy read, except maybe to the more academically minded. I mentioned that Developmental Systems Theory does not have the powerful research program that is making evo-devo so successful, but it’s still a usefully different way of thinking about the world.

  • If any of my students wanted to go on to grad school in developmental biology, and hoped to make it a profession, I had to tell them that they are required to read D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll). It’s old, it’s a little bit weird, but it’s still a major touchstone in the discipline.

  • Lastly, I told them that there was one more book they had to read if they wanted to consider a career in development: Developmental Plasticity and Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mary Jane West-Eberhard. If I were a young graduate student in the field right now, I think I could just open that book to a random page and find an interesting and challenging research problem right there. I might have to flip through a few dozen pages before I found one that wasn’t impossibly hard, but hey, it’s one of those books that fills you in on the array of issues that people are worrying over at the edge of the science.

I don’t think any of these would be a good foundation for an undergraduate course (either Thompson or West-Eberhard or Oyama would probably have a lethal effect on the brain of any unprepared student trying to plow through them), but they’d be great mind-stretchers for any student planning to move on.

So all my lecturing is done for the term, and all that’s left are monstrous piles of grading that will grow ominously in the next week and a half even as I struggle to keep up, and then I can try to polish it all off by Cephalopodmas.

Reason #6 to vote for Pharyngula

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We’re in good shape. Pharyngula is slowly pulling ahead of Bad Astronomy, and I think Phil has just conceded by urging his readers to vote for me. He is admitting that a vote for him is a vote against the eventual squid domination of the Earth, so naturally no one in their right mind is going to vote for him anymore. He also includes a picture of the cutest little kitten as a token of his surrender.

Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you think kittens don’t deserve tentacles.

P.S. I have to give my vote to Majikthise for Best Individual Blog.

AiG poisons a few more minds

A while back, I mentioned this essay contest by Answers in Genesis in which the prize was a $50,000 scholarship to Liberty University. If you’re curious about the winner and one of the runners-up, Zeno has the story: the winner’s essay is all about how anti-matter supports the Bible, and the third place winner has become the official advisor on ID to a presidential candidate (in the sense that my crazy second cousin was a presidential candidate, once upon a time). It’s all rather creepy and sad—poor kids. So young and already sucked into the lunatic fringe.